Rehabbing the Front Porch

New windows for the front porch. 

The shots below are from my front porch as I worked on it. I did it this last summer, 2017. Len helped for a few days, so that sped things up.   It looked pretty crappy. Someone years ago had filled in the originally open porch with some aluminum siding and some storm windows.  At the time it was done, it was probably a good idea, but I wanted it to look a bit better.  I debated between making it like the original and making the porch open again, but I liked the idea of the space being able to be open or closed, for winter and summer. 

This is screenshot from google street view of what the house looked like before I tore into it.

This is a shot of both sides, with the old aluminum storm windows still in place.  The pictures look better than it really was!

Here you can see the siding and the storm windows are removed and I nailed up some shiny, bubble wrap building product. The porch gets a lot of sun so my theory was the shiny stuff would help reflect some of the suns heat and keep the porch a bit cooler.  The porch roof is a flat, rubber membrane sort of thing.  After the porch was finished, I painted the black roof with some reflective white paint intended for mobile homes.  It lowered the temperature of the porch tremendously!  I'd still like to add a vent out through the flat roof, or side, but the paint was a rousing success, better than expected.

This is just another view, from the street, of the porch under construction. I insulated the walls, taped seams etc.

This is the finished, vinyl sided, trimmed, painted, and 4 foot, insulated, slider windows installed.  Still got the crappy door, but that's coming eventually. I'd like to figure out something to make the mansard roof look a bit better too.